Re: loader/stage2 interaction

To: Discussion of Development and Customization of the Red Hat Linux Installer <anaconda-devel-list redhat com>

Subject: Re: loader/stage2 interaction

Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2008 07:47:42 +0800

Chris Lumens wrote:

It may have in the past. It hasn't as long as I've been working on
anaconda, which admittedly has only been three years now.

We did long ago, but removed the support due to an extreme number of
cases where people would only mirror the things they "thought" they
needed and then end up in a bad place. If we go back to supporting it,
we need to add some significant checking to ensure that the packages are
there in advance

Ugh, okay. So then we're in the situation where the repo metadata
refers to (potentially) tons of packages that don't exist. You know, if
the stage2 also contained createrepo we could just rebuild the metadata
on the hard drive partition and.... wait, no, bad idea.
Realistically we could be in the same position with NFS installs as
well. However I bet a lot more people would do HD installs than NFS

Why do you think that? The most likely way to "install from HD" I think
is to stick a USB drive in and install from that. The simplest way to
get an install onto a USB disk, for most people, is to copy a DVD or set
of CD ISO images to it.

I've never found the idea of plugging an ATA disk into an IDE connector
attractive, and of the too many computers this geek has around (a quick
census suggests 13 Pentium IV or better), only two could do an HD
install from a different drive without plugging an extra drive in some
place.

The most common combination for a single-disk multiboot setup would
include Windows, I suspect.

I think in all cases, a bunch of ISO images is easier than a mirrored or
constructed (from ISOs) repo.

For derived distros, the unrolled install repo is easier, but then this
geek would be using http.

installs so we are probably setting ourselves up for real problems here
if we re-enable this.
I'm not attached to the idea. It just seems like we've already got all
the code in place to do it.

The previous implementation predates the use of yum in anaconda.

If not a createrepo, is a "checkrepo" option possible? Advice might be
"If you haven't checked this repo before, you should now."